QUESTION OF THE MONTH: What smart-home platform do you prefer?

I don't know if "prefer" is the correct word.   What I have are two Echo Shows and a Dot.  The one in the living room and the one in the basement pretty much control lights or outlets controlling lights.  The one in the kitchen is used to entertain the grandkids and answer SIMPLE questions (like how many tablespoons in a 1/4 cup).  I gave up on Siri and only use Google Home to control the Nest thermostat.

None of them are smart.  I truly believe that they are getting dumber as time goes on.

I don't have any home automation and not at all interested.  We briefly owned an Amazon Echo but never really used it and to be honest was more trouble than it was worth.  Tried setting it up to "automate" turning on the TV, setting the soundbar, the satellite received etc but it only ever seemed to work 50% of the time.  Apart from that the occasional beep used to annoy us and we didn't like the "always listening" so we turned it off and shoved it on eBay.  We have a Sonos speaker with built in Alexa but that's permanently turned off as well.

I guess Amazon, Google, Apple are likely to be more long lived than some startups that entered the game as those that fold render devices useless because without internet and their servers they don't work (guess not ALL devices are like this.)  Environmentally, I don't like them either - how many servers are needed to turn on a light bulb:

I expect this is fairly typical and this supports (one would hope) thousands of bulbs.  Of course each of these functions will have one or more servers running to support them hopefully only spun up when actually needed for resilience/performance etc).  Whatever, what a waste just because someone wants to turn a light on from their phone!!  God said "Let there be light"; Light said "Downloading firmware update, please wait". 

I am not involved, yet.

This is my area of expertise. 

Alexa is a the most established platform if you just want to get going. 

I am a Google and Amazon instructor and both platforms work in a very simular way.  Having developed "skills" (Amazons term) I can tell you its much easier todo with Amazon (AWS). Google are behind in terms of the development put into the platform. 

There is a current move to self hosted systems like thouse from Home Assistant. 

The Apple home ecosystem is a nice idea but currently poorly executed. 

Its really a bit of a mess but Alexa is the one I would go for if you want something that "Just works" 

Any questions any one has I would be more than happy to answer.

This diagram does not represent "servers". This represensents cloud services and the infrastructure. In reality this is quite an efficiant way. The compute is only used when a voice command is recived.  

What you have here is one of Google's reference diagrams. This is conceptual to show where as many products as possible might fit in. No one would do it this way. Several of the solutions here are duplicates of each other. You select the the one you want to use that best fits your requirments.

These speakers do not listen all the time. A common misconsecption. 

They are listening for a wake word. This then captures the next few seconds of recorded audio. This is sent to a voice to text service at the cloud provider. The text is then matched against a set of commands in a database. That will then send a command to the device.

This is not really any different from pressing a button in a mobile application. 

I have an Alexa system and a Google Home Assistant system. I got into it to explore the technology. Neither is turned on at the moment - my better half did not like them and I don't see much value either (even though I already have the hardware). I ran them for about a year and found I never used them, except as a novelty. The only thing I want remote control of is Christmas lights, but I don't need Alexa for that. I did enjoy the novelty of asking them odd ball questions, but that was mostly about exploring their limitations.

dougw said:

I don't see much value either

I don't use them either but I could see them being very useful if you have or end up in future with a disability.

  No discussion including Alexa would be complete without the obligatory inclusion of Saturday Night Live's Amazon Alexa Silver skit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

We have the Amazon Echos to help control our smart home, because the dot was on sale  but it has served us well, and we added a couple more since that first one. The one in the rec room is a slightly bigger sphere (still a dot, I think?) to get better music quality, and we got a Show for the display and camera, meant for the cottage but because it ties so closely to our home system we decided to keep it at home. We never use the camera, but the display is a nice addition.
When not directly being used it shows us random pictures from a folder of photos we added, and things like weather... seems weirdly random and I wish I knew how to tune what it shows. It's probably possible. Maybe one day I'll spend the time to figure it out.

We do use them all the time, but mostly for on-demand control like "turn off the bedroom lights", "turn on the christmas tree" or "turn on the corner light". And of course for playing music. It does a great job of playing music through a Sonos speaker we keep in the living room.

Our devices are half Z-Wave and half WiFi. The Z-Wave were given to us by our electrical supplier (BC Hydro) as part of a study years ago, which started us on the road to home automations. Since then I've added a few dozen WiFi plugs and switches.

Most of the WiFi devices are controlled with the SmartLife App, which allows devices from various makers to be controlled in just one app. Some are TP-Link, I think there's an accidental other one I thought was SmartLife but turned out to be specialized.

The BC Hydro app controls the Z-Wave devices.

Most of our automations are directly from the main apps, and are generally to turn on outside lights at sundown, and turn them off later at night. That's convenient in general, but also serves as a bit of security.

All of them connect through to Alexa, which allows for an extra bit of automation and on-demand control.

Maybe one of the best features we use the automations for is to slowly turn on lights in the morning for a gentle wake-up
My wife uses Alexa to play music in the morning as an alarm for those times when we have to get up earlier. Very convenient - just blurt out "alexa, wake me up at 7am with the song 'xxx'"

I used to set my clock radio to wake me up with the CBC, but I have totally weaned myself off alarm clocks and I find I still get to work on time. Despite being a "bit" of a gadget freak, I try not to become dependent on technology whenever possible. For example, I don't carry a cell phone with me when I am out and about.